American state and local police can now legally detect, track and in some cases destroy a drone on their own authority. Roughly 46 agencies have been trained to do it. The government’s own paperwork expects about 1,850 to take part.
That gap is the substance of the SAFER SKIES rollout, and both numbers come from the government’s own filings. The interim final rule — issued jointly by the Department of Homeland Security at 6 CFR Part 124 (RIN 1601-AB25) and the Department of Justice at 28 CFR Part 124 (RIN 1110-AA39) — took effect on July 1, 2026 and was published in the Federal Register on July 6. Its comment period closes on September 4.
Until now, counter-drone authority in the United States sat with a short list of federal agencies. Everyone else, including the police department responsible for a stadium, could watch a drone on a display and do nothing about it. The SAFER SKIES Act, enacted as Title LXXXVI of the FY2026 National Defense Authorization Act (Public Law 119-60) and signed on December 18, 2025, changed that. This rule is the machinery.
Two tiers, and a meaningful difference between them
The rule splits participating agencies into two certifications. A detection-and-warning certification permits detecting, identifying, monitoring, tracking, warning and confiscation. A mitigation certification goes considerably further: disrupting, interfering with, seizing control of, or destroying an aircraft using reasonable force.
The obligations scale accordingly. A certified agency needs an implementation policy, an approved list of technologies, a counter-UAS operations plan, advance coordination and notification arrangements, and real-time notification to air traffic control. Any mitigation action must be reported within 48 hours, with a semiannual operational summary covering total operations, mitigation actions, detection activity, retention of communications records beyond 180 days, and any disclosure outside the originating agency.
Where the numbers come from
The rule states that the FBI’s National Counter-UAS Training Center “has trained and certified the operators of approximately 46 agencies through its resident courses to date.”
On September 1, the Justice Department published a separate information-collection notice for the same programme — OMB control number 1110-0090, comments due November 2. It estimates approximately 1,850 SLTT agency respondents, split into roughly 1,500 detection-tier and 350 mitigation-tier agencies, generating around 24,355 responses and 25,314 burden hours annually.
Those two documents describe the same programme two months apart. One reports the agencies actually trained; the other projects the agencies expected to participate. The ratio is roughly forty to one.
Why the departments moved this fast
The rule is unusually candid about the pressure behind it. It records that as of June 20, 2026, DHS and the FBI “have recorded over 600 drone incursions into restricted airspace across host-city venues” during World Cup operations spanning 11 United States host cities — a figure logged before the tournament reached its closing rounds.
The statute required regulations within 180 days of the December 2025 signing. The departments issued this as an interim final rule, effective immediately and taking comment afterwards, rather than running a conventional proposal first.
The reading
FlightBrief’s assessment is that the training pipeline, not the legal authority, is now the binding constraint. Congress resolved the authority question; a single FBI resident-course pipeline that has certified operators at around 46 agencies cannot plausibly process 1,850 of them at speed, and the mitigation tier — the one that involves bringing an aircraft down over a populated area — is the half that most needs unhurried instruction.
There is a second limit that has drawn little attention. Congress gave DOJ and DHS two new statutory bases for counter-drone action, covering law enforcement and protection of the public. It did not extend those bases to state and local agencies. Non-federal police are operating inside a narrower authority than the federal agencies writing the rule.
Watch the comment file after September 4, and watch whether the FBI’s training capacity is expanded or delegated. The 1,850 figure is not a target the government published in a press release; it is the number it told the Office of Management and Budget it expects to administer.
